In this competitive age, when new industries sprout and decay in the span of a decade, we should reflect on how a company survives to celebrate its 350th anniversary. A prerequisite for survival in business is the ability to adapt to changing environments and tastes, and to sense, anticipate, and meet needs faster and better than the competition. This requires constant innovation as well as focused attention to execution. A company that continues to provide meaningful and profitable solutions to human problems has a chance to survive, even thrive, in a rapidly changing and highly competitive world.Biology has a brilliant algorithm for solving the problem of survival over time: evolution. Those who adapt and (re)produce outcompete the less agile and less fertile. Over the last 30 years-which seems a long time but is less than one-tenth the time Merck has been in business-I have tried to adapt biologys mechanisms for innovation and optimization to solving problems in chemistry and engineering. It turns out that evolution is a powerful forward-engineering process, whose widespread adoption in enzyme engineering and synthetic biology has been made possible through advances in molecular biology and high-throughput screening.Expanding Nature's Catalytic Repertoire for a Sustainable Chemical Industry Nature, the best chemist of all time, solves the difficult problem of being alive and enduring for billions of years, under an astonishing range of conditions. Most of the marvelous chemistry that makes life possible is the work of natures macromolecular protein catalysts, the enzymes. By using enzymes, nature can extract materials and energy from the environment and convert them into self-replicating, selfrepairing, mobile, adaptable, and sometimes even thinking biochemical systems. These systems are good models for a sustainable chemical industry that uses renewable resources and recycles a good fraction of its products. And biology is not just a model from which to draw inspiration: living organisms or their components can be efficient production platforms. In fact, I predict that DNA-programmable microorganisms will be producing many of our chemicals in the not-so-distant future.That most chemicals are made using synthetic processes starting from petroleum-based feedstocks reflects the remarkable creativity of synthetic chemists in developing reaction schemes and catalysts that nature never discovered. Synthetic chemistry has given us an explosion of products, which feed, clothe, house, entertain, and cure us. Synthetic chemistry, however, struggles to match the efficiency and selectivity that biology achieves with enzymes. In many cases, synthetic processes rely on precious metals, toxic reagents and solvents, and extreme conditions, and they generate substantial amounts of unwanted byproducts. DNA-programmable chemical synthesis using enzymes promises to improve on synthetic chemistry, particularly if we are able to expand biologys catalytic repertoire to include some of the most synthetically useful reactions, under...